The Clean Coder : Teams and Projects

Your organisation might have several teams and several projects. It is important to know how to manage these 2 areas of your IT department in order to get things done.

In a “project first” environment it can happen that some people will work on several projects at the same time but with different teams. A developer working in this type of environment will have to learn the methodology used for project A and the one used by the team on project B which can be completely different from the first one. He will also have to learn to work in an effective way with the people of project A and the ones of the other project. Making these switches over and over can be annoying or even frustrating. At the end this will result in a loss of focus for the people working on distinct projects.

Forming a team (a real team and not a group of individuals) is a long process. It takes time for the members to know each other, it takes time for them to know each other strengths and weaknesses, it takes time to understand each other motivation. The members will start to form relationships at some point, the team begins to gel. However having a gelled team is worth the waiting, the members will enter into a new dimension, they can do miracles. They will anticipate each other, they will support each other and they demand the best from each other, they make things happen.

In software development a gelled team is not only composed of programmers, the testers and the business analysts are part of this team as well, all of them working with a project manager. They will all plan together, face issues together and solve problems together, they work as a team. The analysts develop the requirements and are able to write the acceptance tests through user stories. The testers will also write acceptance tests from another perspective, they focus on correctness providing failure scenarios where analysts focus on the happy path. The project manager tracks the progress of the team and makes sure that the team is heading the right way.

Once your organisation has a gelled team you do not want to break it, you want to keep it alive. When the team’s project is reaching its end, give them a new one. They already know how to work as a team and they can focus on this new project right away at full speed. These kind of teams can even work on several projects simultaneously once they know their velocity. This velocity is shared amongst the projects depending on their importance and can be reallocate during crisis for example. It is easier to switch from a project to another with the same team than switching from a team to another.

Building teams is way harder than building projects, this is why it is important to persist them and make them work on a project after one another. In some cases they can even work on more than one at the same time. It takes time to build these teams but once it’s done they exceed the expectations you had.